HummingBoard-Gate

$50 HummingBoard-Gate can be accessorized 150 different ways article presents yet another somewhat interesting looking single-board computer — like the Raspberry Pi, but with a steeper price tag: A $50 board is called the HummingBoard-Gate from SolidRun is designed to be as an ans easy to use modular IoT gateway. HummingBoard Gate: Tiny PC supports 150+ add-ons promises that you can plug in 150 different add-on modules and the board has native mikroBUS socket, which means you can easily attach any “click board” that’s compatible with MikroElektronika’s system. HummingBoard-Gate claims to be the first application processor board to include an integrated native mikroBUS™. The board has 102 x 69mm footprint, wide-range 7-36V power supply, and optional metal enclosure.

HummingBoard-Gate board is based on Cortex-A9-based Freescale’s iMX6 series SoC. The HummingBoard-Gate is billed as a front-line Internet of Things (IoT) aggregation system that can run your MQTT broker to consolidate and route your IoT messaging. You can expand the data you can collect by easily adding sensors using mikroBUS click boards, then deploy your Node-Red flows to act on the data collected. HummingBoard-Gate can run variety of standard Linux distributions and  IoT middlewares such as Node-RED, MQTT broker, openHAB and others.

You might ask what is mikroBUS connector? MikroElektronika’s mikroBUS™ standard defines mainboard sockets and add-on boards used for interfacing microcontrollers or microprocessors (mainboards) with integrated circuits and modules (add-on boards). MikroElektronika’s mikroBUS™ has been originally aimed at microcontroller platforms like PIC, AVR, TIVA, and STM32

The purpose of mikroBUS™ is to enable easy hardware expandability with a large number of standardized compact add-on boards, each one carrying a single sensor, transceiver, display, encoder, motor driver, connection port, or any other electronic module or integrated circuit. Created by MikroElektronika, mikroBUS™ is an open standard — anyone can implement mikroBUS™ in their hardware design, as long as the requirements set by microBUS Standard specifications document are being met.